Download The Olmec and Toltec: The History of Early Mesoamerica's Most Influential Cultures AudioBook Free
The Olmec people are more popular as the first major civilization of Mexico and are thus generally regarded as the mother civilization of Mesoamerica, making them the people from which all following Mesoamerican cultures derived. In fact, the word Olmec is considered to have originated with the Aztec people, as Olmec in their Nahuatl terminology means "the rubber people", a reference to the inhabitants of the land that they accessed rubber. More often than not, the Olmec culture could very well be best identifiable by their so-called colossal minds, mammoth basalt head-statues wearing helmet-like headdresses found throughout Olmec habitation sites. Around 2500 BC, the Olmec resolved primarily along Mexico's Gulf Coastline in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico (in the modern-day Areas of Veracruz and Tabasco), and they flourished during North America's Prehistoric Indian Formative period from about 1700-400 BC. Their direct cultural contributions were still noticeable as later as AD 300. Among Mesoamerican scholars, the Formative period is subdivided in to the Preclassic (Olmec period), Basic (Maya period), and Postclassic (Toltec and Aztec periods). The Olmec's agricultural talents sustained them and made certain their power and affect for over a millennium. They produced corn/maize, squash, and other place foods in such quantities that they were afforded the manpower to build great monuments and ceremonial centers to help expand promote their ethnical personal information. From a ethnical standpoint, their pyramids, wide open plazas, their ballgame, and perhaps even centers of human sacrifice are thought to established the societal model that following societies like the Maya, Zapotec, Teotihuacano, Toltec, Mixtec, and Aztec would emulate. Inside the same vein, some scholars believe they also affected the ethnical development of the Indigenous American groups of the United States and those of Central and SOUTH USA as well. Proving to be one the most enduring models ever before, the religious and cultural structure the Olmec set up presented reign for over 3,000 years, and it would likely have endured a lot longer without the introduction of the Spanish conquistadors. The Toltec are one of the most famous Mesoamerican teams in SOUTH USA, nonetheless they are also the most controversial and secret. The Toltec have been identified as the group that set up a strong express focused in Tula (in present-day Mexico), and the Aztec claimed the Toltec as their ethnical predecessors, very much so that the word Toltec comes from the Aztec's phrase Toltecatl, translated as artisan. The Aztec also kept tabs on the Toltec's record, including keeping a list of important rulers and events, that suggest the optimum of the Toltec occurred from about AD 900-1100. While scholars continue to debate if the Toltec were an actual historical group, there is an added part of unknown to the actual fact that the arrangement at Tula has a great deal in common with the famous Mayan arrangement at Chichén Itzá. The structures and skill at both sites are so similar that archaeologists and anthropologists have assumed they had the same ethnical influences, even as historians struggle to determine the historical timelines, and so whether Tula influenced Chichén Itzá or vice versa.
